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The pious layman Robert Nelson's 1704 tract A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England was arguably the most popular and important Anglican devotional work of the eighteenth century. Ostensibly a simple guidebook to the Anglican liturgical calendar, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was, in fact, a précis of Anglican theology and ecclesiology. What has been less clearly recognized, however, was the extent to which Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was also a sharply polemical work. This article considers Nelson's tract as a defense of “the sacred” as demarcating a socially and cognitively distinct sphere of life. Nelson's work takes great pains to maintain the spaces, offices, festivals and personnel of the church as “set apart” from the commerce of everyday life; and nearly every page exudes a fear of encroachment on the sacred. Nelson's conception of the sacred, and the manifold threats to its differentiation, provokes a reconsideration of the prevalent narratives of religious transformation in the early English enlightenment. Most importantly, it underscores the serious limitations of the current debate over secularization in this period.

The occasional conformity controversy during the reign of Queen Anne has traditionally been understood as a straightforward symptom of the early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’. For all the pious rhetoric concerning toleration and the church in danger, the controversy is considered a partisan squabble for short-term political gain. This traditional interpretation has, however, never been able to account for two features of the controversy: first, the focus on ‘moderation’ as a unique characteristic of post-Revolutionary English society; and second, the prominence of the Anglican nonjurors in the debate. This article revisits the occasional conformity controversy with an eye toward explaining these two related features. In doing so, it will argue that the occasional conformity controversy comprised a referendum on the Revolution settlement in church and state. Nonjurors lit upon the practice of occasional conformity as emblematic of the broader malady of moderation afflicting post-Revolutionary England. From their opposition to occasional conformity, the nonjurors, and soon the broader Anglican high-church movement, developed a comprehensive critique of religious modernity that would inform the entire framework of debate in the early English Enlightenment.

This article sets the wide-ranging controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity that erupted in late seventeenth-century England firmly within the political context of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. Against a voluminous historiography that confines the trinitarian controversy within the apolitical narrative of an incipient English enlightenment, this article considers the controversy as part of the broader political crisis that befell church and state in the final years of the century. The trinitarian controversy must be understood not simply as a doctrinal dispute but as a disciplinary crisis: a far-reaching debate over not only the content of orthodoxy but also the constitutional apportionment of responsibilities for its enforcement. As such, the controversy featured interventions from an unprecedented array of public authorities—Crown, Parliament, university, episcopate, and convocation—all claiming the preeminent custody of orthodoxy in an institutional landscape profoundly unsettled by revolutionary upheaval. This institutional dimension, long ignored by historians and theologians, placed the trinitarian controversy at the heart of civil and ecclesiastical politics during the reign of William and Mary. Indeed, the trinitarian controversy may be considered the defining event in church politics in the postrevolutionary era, exercising a prevailing influence on the content of Anglican ecclesiastical partisanship for much of the early eighteenth century. While recognizing the importance of these disputes to the emergence of an English enlightenment, this article insists that the trinitarian controversy is equally indispensable for understanding the rage of political parties in postrevolutionary England.

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